Moshe Yanai

Moshe Yanai (Hebrew: משה ינאי‎‎; born 1949) is an Israeli electrical engineer. He is an inventor,^[1] businessman, entrepreneur,^[2] aviator (pilot),^[3] investor,^[2][4] and philanthropist.^[5][6] He led the development of the EMC Symmetrix, the flagship product of EMC Corporation in the 1990s.

Biography

Moshe Yanai was born in 1949 in Israel, and earned a B.Sc. in electrical engineering in 1975 from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Yanai began his career building IBM-compatible mainframe data storage based on minicomputer disks for Elbit Systems (a joint project with Nixdorf Computer). He went on to develop high-end storage systems for Nixdorf in the United States.

Yanai joined EMC Corporation in 1987, and managed the Symmetrix development, software and hardware, from its inception in the late 1980s^[7] until shortly before leaving EMC in 2001.^[8] His development team grew from several people, recruited among his former Israeli colleagues, to thousands, while he was vice president.^[7] EMC grew in the 1990s, both in size and value, from a company with a fading business of (minicomputer) computer memory boards, valued in several millions of dollars, to a hundreds-of-billions company.^[9][10] Before leaving he became an EMC Fellow.^[8]

Yanai funded and led an Israeli storage startup company, XIV,^[11] which was bought by IBM in January 2008 (IBM paid an estimated $300 million for a company invested in with an estimated $3 million).^[12] Yanai continued leading XIV^[13] and became an IBM Fellow.^[14] The IBM XIV Storage System became an IBM storage product.^[15] Shortly later, in April 2008, IBM bought Diligent Technologies,^[16] another storage company co-founded by Yanai.^[4] He left IBM in 2010.^[2] In 2011 he founded Infinidat, a computer data storage company. In April 2015, Infinidat announced a $150 million investment led by TPG Capital.^[17] This investment placed it among the most valuable privately held companies.^[18]

Yanai is an inventor or co-inventor of about 40 US patents in the field of electronic data storage.

In June 2011 his Alma mater, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, awarded him the honor Distinguished Fellow of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and in 2012, conferred upon him an Honorary Doctorate. He has been a board of directors member of several companies.^[7] Also in 2011, Moshe Infinidat became its CEO.^[19]

Awards

• EMC Fellow – 2001^[8]
• IBM Fellow – 2008.^[14]
• IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award – 2010^[20]
• Distinguished Fellow of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology – 2011
• Honorary Doctorate, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology – 2012

References